Sun Leaks Intel Nehalem Performance Info
Intel has been slowly serving up information regarding the company’s upcoming Nehalem microarchitecture for many months now. In our sneak peek at Nehalem and Intel’s 45nm High-K article from way back in March of last year, we outlined many of the details regarding Nehalem, but unfortunately we did not have any projected performance numbers to disclose. Some news broke today, however, regarding a PDF that was inadvertently leaked by Sun Microsystems that not only mentions Nehalem, but has some performance data listed as well.
“So how can Intel pull off such a massive performance boost over their current reigning champion “Harpertown” X5482 processor? Consider the fact that Intel’s current generation 45nm Harpertown processors lead the benchmarks despite the memory bandwidth disadvantage because of a much faster execution engine and larger cache. Then we factor in the fact that Intel will implement SMT (dual threads per CPU core), improve the already-fast execution engine of Harpertown, and feed it with three channels of DDR3 memory per CPU instead of the old shared front side bus.”
George Ou of ZDNet has taken the data and extrapolated expected benchmark results. They show Nehalem handily outpacing all other configurations, including a 2.8GHz Shanghai-based AMD CPU.
